Yashica Mat

On 20 March 2025, I ordered a Yashica Mat on eBay from a seller in Japan. Mine dates to 1957, making it older than my parents. It’s the original Mat, with no numbers or letters after the name.

The Yashica Mat came out in April 1957, when the company was still called Yashima Optical. Its first twin-lens reflex camera, the Yashimaflex, had appeared four years earlier.

The German Rolleiflex was the benchmark for cameras like this. Yashica offered a more affordable way to shoot in a similar format: two lenses, a viewfinder on top, and square frames on roll film. But the Mat wasn’t the simplest model in Yashica’s own range. It had a crank that advanced the film and cocked the shutter in one motion, and a four-element taking lens.

It was a Japanese camera, but not just for the Japanese market. Yashica sold its cameras abroad, including in the US. An affordable Japanese alternative to the Rolleiflex is a more accurate description than a camera made exclusively for domestic buyers.

Mine has serial number 73746 and a Lumaxar 80mm f/3.5 lens. The earliest Mats had a 75mm lens, but this changed to 80mm during 1957. The Yashinon name, more familiar from other Yashica models, came later.

An 80mm lens here doesn’t give you the same magnification it would on a 35mm camera. The frame is bigger, so this is more of an everyday, general-purpose lens. It isn’t interchangeable.

My camera has a few problems. Sometimes the crank doesn’t advance the film far enough, and neighbouring frames overlap. The self-timer doesn’t work either. I still use it, but I’ve had to get used to its quirks.

TLR stands for twin-lens reflex. The upper lens is for composing and focusing. A mirror behind it directs the image upwards onto a ground-glass screen. The lower lens takes the actual photograph.

A folding hood opens on top. You look down into it, usually holding the camera around waist height. The image is mirrored, with left and right reversed. There’s a small magnifier you can flip up for more precise focusing.

Both lenses move together when you focus. But they see the scene from slightly different positions, so at close distances the framing on the screen doesn’t quite match what ends up on film. That’s called parallax.

Unlike an SLR, the mirror doesn’t flip up when you take a photo. It stays in place while the shutter opens in the lower lens, so the viewfinder doesn’t black out during the exposure.

The camera takes 120 film. That’s the name of the format, not its width in millimetres. One roll gives you 12 square frames, roughly 6 × 6 cm each. The actual image area is about 56 × 56 mm.

It’s entirely mechanical and doesn’t need batteries. This model has no built-in light meter, so you meter separately and set the shutter speed and aperture by hand. There’s no autofocus either: you turn the knob on the side and judge focus on the screen.

After each shot, the crank advances the film and cocks the shutter. Once the roll is finished, you wind the rest onto the take-up spool and send it off for development. There’s no need to rewind it into a cartridge as you would with 35mm film.

Here are some of my favourite photos on Yashica Mat. You can see more in my photographs. The colour isn’t down to the camera alone: the film, development and scanning all make a big difference too.